All posts tagged ‘junkets’

I’ve been hooked on Star Wars for nearly as long as anyone could have been, and on science fiction movies in general since I was very young. It’s been incredibly gratifying to me as a parent to see both of my kids embrace many of my geeky interests, and doubly so in the case of Star Wars– three Halloweens ago, without any prompting, they decided to go as Darth Vader and Princess Leia, and the geek-fatherly pride I felt nearly made me tear up. So you can imagine how I felt when I received an invitation to visit Skywalker Ranch and Lucasfilm’s headquarters on a junket for the upcoming release of The Phantom Menace in 3D, and to bring one of my kids with me. The fact that it was the weekend of my son’s 11th birthday made it all the sweeter.

My son and I arrived in San Francisco on Friday night, January 27, to find an Ultimate FX lightsaber on the hotel room bed with a note on it instructing us to bring it with us the next day to the ranch. It was late — particularly for us, as we’d flown in from the East Coast — but of course we had to take the lightsaber out of its package and make sure it worked. You know, just in case it was defective.

The next day we were taken, along with a group of other blogger parents and kids including Andrea Schwalm of GeekMom and her son, to Skywalker Ranch. It was a beautiful day, and the view approaching and crossing the Golden Gate Bridge was breathtaking. But you can see San Francisco Bay any day, so the coolness of seeing Alcatraz was quickly eclipsed in our minds by the knowledge that we would soon be going where (relatively) few geeks have gone before.